via Lionsgate Television
Hold onto your beer helmets, Blue Mountain State fans: After almost a decade, Thad Castle and the gang might just be blitzing back into our lives.
According to a report from Deadline, a “followup” Blue Mountain State sequel series from Lionsgate Television is currently being shopped around to Amazon and Netflix. Alan Ritchson, who has gone on to mainstream success as Jack Reacher in Amazon’s Reacher, is said to be reprising his iconic role as the legendary Thad Castle.
Created by Chris Romano and Eric Falconer, Blue Mountain State originally aired on Spike TV for three seasons, from 2010 – 2013. A Kickstarter-backed movie called Blue Mountain State: The Rise of Thadland, was released in 2016 with Ritchson, Romano, and Darin Brooks reprising their roles.
VIDEO: How Alan Ritchson Took Over Hollywood:
Blue Mountain State wasn’t just a show about a fictional college football team but a raunchy three-season-long party about college hijinx on basic cable. The raucous and irreverent world of the BMS Mountain Goats inevitably faded away as scripted comedy started to lose their punch on the medium. But it was a great run while it lasted: Think Community and Parks & Rec, with a little bit of Workaholics and the best parts of Entourage blended in. Just like the best of college memories, it refuses to fade away for a certain generation of good-natured and unabashedly bro-y millennials who were in college (…or just graduated from it) at the time.
Thanks to the magic of streaming, the series found a new lease on life on Netflix for a few years, where it went from cult classic to full-blown legend.
We celebrated the show religiously here on BroBible back in the day. When it first came out in 2010, it was originally called “dumb even by frat-boy standards” by Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times. Honestly, that just made me more excited about the show’s potential as cult pheonomenon we could celebrate and love here in the pages of Brobible dot com. In fact, when the movie came out in 2016, Falconer and Romano a.k.a. Romanski told me about the real possibility of Blue Mountain State eventually coming back, especially as the show started to have a second life on Netflix.
The potential revival of one of the most unabashedly bro-tastic shows in recent memory, promising more football, more debauchery, and, of course, more Thad, except now for new audiences on streaming platforms and aging millennials all grown up in their 30s and 40s. For those of you who might have been living under a rock (or were studying in college), Thad Castle is the epitome of college football bro culture—imagine if a protein shake and a keg stand had a baby, and that baby was really, really into football. Ritchson’s portrayal of Thad was so spot-on that you couldn’t help but love the guy, even when he was being a total meathead. His ability to deliver lines with the perfect blend of machismo and cluelessness was nothing short of comedic genius.
It’s no wonder that 41-year-old Ritchson, at 6’3″, has gone on to get even more jacked and dominate Hollywood, steroids and all.
We’ll see if a platform bites on a Blue Mountain State reboot. The show is still just in the shopping phase. But it probably helps that Ritchson’s star is shining brighter than ever, even telling our Eric Italiano that he would “love” to be considered for a role as Batman someday. The cultural winds have certainly changed around raunchy comedies in the last couple years, with some fans worried that it’d be a more dilluted and watered down version of BMS than the original Spike TV era.
But the potential for great storytelling in the BMS universe is promising. For example, I personally think it would be hilarious to see Thad Castle as a college football coach in the NIL era, growing older but not up with more responsibilities and money in his bank account. Think about how much college football has changed in the last decade. There’s so much comedy potential for Thad, Sammy Cacciatore, and Alex Moran in a older but not nessecarily any wiser life stage. Dads, careers, divorces, relationships to navigate, etc. Plus, how fun would it be to bring back Denise Richards as Coach Marty’s ex-wife Debra Simon?
So, get ready to don your Goats gear and prepare for the triumphant return of Thad Castle and the crew. If it happens, it’s going to be epic, it’s going to be wild, and if we know anything about BMS, it’s definitely going to be a party worth crashing.
As we like to say around here…
You know what rhymes with best bros?
…
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Go Goats!